Under the theme “Philanthropy | Empowerment | Change,” the morning’s keynote speaker, financial journalist and author Stacey Tisdale, MC ’88, spoke specifically about how priorities have been upended by workers during the pandemic, with women leading the charge for better work/life balance. Indeed, as the day progressed, panelists spoke of a balance struck by necessity, often on Zoom in the kitchen with the kids across the table.

“Women are heads of households, even though we’re certainly not treated that way,” said Tisdale, speaking to hundreds of virtual attendees. “Women participate in the provider side of the financial equation much more than they used to, but the belief that it is a man’s job to provide for his family and it is a woman’s job to take care of her family is still common.”

Tisdale noted women control over 60% of all the personal wealth in the U.S. and a majority of the personal wealth in the world. Yet, only 22% of women rate themselves as very well prepared for financial decision-making.

“There’s a confidence gap here we’re talking about,” she said. “Women were not always taught to be empowered in our financial decisions. I’m challenging you to go a little bit deeper. Where do you want things to change?”

She challenged viewers to examine self-perceptions.

“You are already perfect. If you don’t believe this, it is due to a flaw of your understanding,” she said. “Get rid of this understanding and you will become rich. Know that you’re born with the ability to accomplish things. The numbers stuff is the easy part.”

Fordham College at Lincoln Center junior Jayda Jones told attendees how scholarships
made her journey at the University possible.

Being Vulnerable and Promoting Empathy

In a panel following Tisdale’s talk titled “Compassionate and Collaborative Leadership in the Workplace,” Fordham Law adjunct professor Katherine Hughes, LAW ’08, GSAS ’08, said that having her kids doing schoolwork across the table while she met colleagues on Zoom changed her perception of leadership.

“I think that part of being a leader now is to show those pieces of myself and show my vulnerability,” she said, adding that wearing her heart on her sleeve has made her an empathetic leader.

“You forget that you’re dealing with people sometimes, one of the silver linings [of quarantine was that]I was forced to see people as people,” she said.

Eventually, however, the kitchen became far too small. She now works from her basement to create a perceived separation from home life with an up-the-stairs commute for dinner.

Christina Luconi, PAR, chief people officer at the cybersecurity firm RAPID7, concurred that creating personal space remains key for those working virtually. She breaks up her day with a long run to put herself in the “right headspace for the day.” Fellow panelist Peggy Smyth, FCRH ’85, said that she too needs long walks to as a break from being “a short-order cook” for her athlete sons and being the U.S. senior advisor on global infrastructure for QIC, the Australian investment firm.

Marjorie Cadogan, FCRH ’82, LAW ’85, said that while she agreed that creating space between work and life in the virtual workplace is important, she said virtual meetings have broken down a perceived wall. 

“One of the great things for me was to be able to see work as a part of life,” she said. “Work is a piece of a whole and you really do have to understand that you have to work with the whole [of life]to get the best of the piece.”

In the chat, she elaborated.

“You have to talk to people about their own relationships, hobbies, activities that are important to them and hopefully be able to share those important priorities,” she wrote. “The communication issue is a big one, because people communicate in different ways. Sometimes you just have to tell people what you need and what style of communication you respond to best to deliver your best work or response.”

Getting Real: Leadership Amidst Pain

In an afternoon panel titled “Compassionate and Collaborative Leadership in the Community,” Kimberly Hardy-Watson, FCRH ’84, president and CEO of Graham Windham, a nonprofit working with families in the city’s underserved communities, brought the brutal realities of the pandemic home.

“I have had to say goodbye to 52 people in this time frame and I’m not an anomaly. Whole communities were impacted by the loss and I’m still finding out who we lost,” she said, adding that the deaths have made everyone reframe priorities.

“I’m pleased at the pushback, [workers]are voting with their feet and saying that work life/harmony is important,” she said, noting that many workers are looking for new jobs in what was referred to as the Great Resignation.

Yet, Hardy-Watson admitted that even she was reticent to reveal everything she was going through during the pandemic. She contracted the virus herself, and with so many people depending on her, she coped with it in silence. Eventually, she stepped back and acknowledged what was going on.

“There’s a level of authenticity that has happened in this time that I haven’t seen in a while and there are huge opportunities in that,” she said.

Jane Abitanta, GABELLI ’85, ’86, concurred.

“I feel that the pandemic has cracked hearts open, she said, adding that communication had been more authentic and honest. “But not everyone feels ready to move forward. There’s that idea that we want to create normalcy and that’s not going to be easy for everyone to do—and I’m not even sure that’s a good idea.”

In her role as founder and CEO at the communications firm Perceval Associates, Abitanta recently spoke to a high-ranking real estate investor who said his firm was underwriting a financial plan that forecasts a pandemic every five years.

“We’re in a chronic crisis mode and have to get even more creative in virtual communication and in person, but not everyone is ready for that,” she said.

Naelys Luna, GSS ’01, ’05, founding dean of the College of Social Work and Criminal Justice at Florida Atlantic University, agreed that even leaders need to acknowledge that they’re experiencing trauma.

“[T]he process of becoming a leader is much the same as becoming integrated human beings; many times we spend a tremendous effort of putting out fires and when you put that together with the chronic stress [of the pandemic]—and certainly we all feel it—it puts you in a reactive mode and that alters the way you see things.”

Giving as Your Authentic Self

Joan Garry, FCRH ’79, former executive director of the gay rights organization GLAAD, who now runs her own nonprofit consulting firm, said that the authenticity one sees emerging in the workforce has permeated all sectors of the economy, including nonprofits and philanthropy. But it’s not a new concept, she said. It’s one she learned at Fordham.

“As our Jesuit values remind us, we are women for others,” she said. “So, take a look in the mirror, you’re staring at an activist.”

She noted that women make 90% of the philanthropic decisions for the nation’s families. Indeed, many of the attendees said they already belonged to one of Fordham’s Giving Circles, which allow donors to give regularly—starting at $100 a year—to any area of the University, from STEM funds, to a mission-focused fund called Living the Mission, to particular colleges or graduate schools.

Indeed, in her own family, she and her wife spearheaded a giving circle among her children and their cousins. The kids decided to give to a wildlife foundation. When the foundation sent a stuffed polar bear to the house as a thank you gift for giving, her son was furious. He wanted all the money they gave didn’t go to real animals.

She referred to the get-something-for-giving scenario as the “Girl Scout Cookie Syndrome.”

“It’s all about the thin mints,” she said. “Even the well-informed people who know about the great work of Girl Scouts develop some form of sugar amnesia.”

She equated the so-called cookie syndrome to inauthentic special events pegged to bold-named celebrities rather than the cause, leading some attendees to have no idea what they’re supporting. She pointedly excluded the Fordham Founder’s Dinner, which she said brings the mission of the evening to life.

“This pandemic has changed all of us in ways we do not yet understand,” she said. “We need to look at everything with intention to make sure our life has meaning and purpose.”

And that includes philanthropy, she said.

“We have to give with an understating of our privilege and with a sense of joy.”

“I saw how much pain and suffering people’s financial lives are causing [them],” she said, despite their efforts to stick to a budget and “create financial security.”

Tisdale, a 1988 graduate of Marymount College (the Tarrytown, New York, women’s college that was part of Fordham University from 2002 until it closed in 2007), said she felt many financial experts were overlooking—or underestimating—the “psychological and emotional toll of financial stress.” She saw a disconnect between consumers’ good intentions and “how our economic system works.”

She wanted to get down to root causes, so she spent six years researching consumers’ financial behavior, interviewing experts such as clinical psychologist James Prochaska, Ph.D., and collaborating with financial adviser Paula Boyer Kennedy to write a book, The True Cost of Happiness: The Real Story Behind Managing Your Money (Wiley, 2007).

One of the things she found is that our financial decisions can “really reflect … where you are—and if you’re not living in step with your priorities.”

“Money’s almost like a palm reader,” she said. “You learn a lot about someone if you look at their financial choices, their financial life.”

Tisdale wrote The True Cost of Happiness to help people bring their decisions in line with their priorities. She plans to share some of that wisdom during the fifth annual Fordham Women’s Summit, to be held virtually on Wednesday, Oct. 20. (Update: Watch Tisdale’s address at the Summit.)

She also wants to draw on her personal story to help attendees examine the various experiences and influences that have shaped their financial lives.

“For me, experiences that I’ve had—being born a Black woman, growing up with a privileged life and finding myself a lot of times in racial isolation, and trying to build career as a Black female financial journalist—I didn’t really feel like I fit into any group, and so I had to look deeper into dimensions of myself,” she said, to understand how all of those things affected her approach to money and to making financial decisions in line with her priorities.

The True Cost of Happiness was published in late 2007, right at the start of the Great Recession, which inspired many people and groups to contact Tisdale for advice. The White House asked her to develop a behavior-based financial education program for students at historically Black colleges and universities.

“That’s maybe where my lightbulb went off,” she said, and she began to feel a call to “educate and teach.”

Shortly after her book was published, Tisdale took that calling to the next level. With fundraising help and support from NFL Hall of Famer Ronnie Lott, she launched Winning Play$, a program that aims to teach students how to create positive relationship with money and how to manage it effectively. The program won an Excellence in Economic Education from the U.S. Department of Education in 2010.

Tisdale is also the founder and CEO of a multimedia company, Mind Money Media, that aims to educate people about the complex psychology of money, including how socioeconomics, gender, race, age, sexual orientation, and culture affect our financial experiences.

“People don’t get much education in how to navigate those deeper aspects of ourselves, and that’s what I hope to show people how to do,” she said.

Fordham Magazine spoke with Tisdale in advance of her keynote address at the Women’s Summit.

How did you get interested in financial behavior?
When I worked on Wall Street, I really saw how the financial system worked and how that integrated into the community, into our lives. And my first job in journalism was at The Wall Street Journal. That really immersed me into how businesses work, from the inside out. When I went to CBS, it was a total 180: I was immersed into the financial experience of human beings. Having seen all that intersectionality, I saw how much pain and suffering people’s financial lives are causing them—money is the leading cause of depression, the leading cause of substance abuse, the leading cause of divorce.

Why did you want to do all this research into financial behavior?
Money works very simply: Don’t spend more than you have. Don’t borrow more than you can afford to pay back. Don’t invest more than you can afford to lose. But I can also see this disconnect between the intentions of consumers to create financial security and how our economic system works. They don’t coincide very well, largely because people place a big focus on the monetary side of money when the psychological and emotional toll of financial stress is really causing problems.

What did you learn from your research?
The problem became clear: We live our financial lives largely through conditioning—I call it the “money script.”

There really are three major areas: the childhood script—the way we saw money handled, or not, managed or not, growing up; social scripts—the messaging we see that our brains literally process and that we get our sense of identity from; and social messaging around gender and race—what our behaviors are “supposed to be.”

I was able to identify real skills to navigate this positioning, to help people learn to see what those messages are that we tell ourselves about money, so that we can rewrite scripts where they don’t serve us. That means having a visceral connection to what your true goals and priorities are, and what is important to you. When you connect your financial behavior to that, you’ll generally see that you spend a lot of time and money on things that are not authentically important to you, and you will find that you have a lot more resources for what really matters.

How did your time at Marymount influence you and your career path?
It was just such a supportive environment and an environment where it was so natural for women to be all that they can be. I came to Marymount after a pretty traumatic experience—I had been a figure skater, and I was vying for a spot on the U.S. national team. I left home when I was 11 years old to go live and train with coaches. And I got into a car accident, which ended my skating career. I went straight to college, to Marymount. It was just such a transitional time for me, so to be in such a safe and nurturing place where learning was fun, relationships were forged—that was what I needed.

What do you hope to share during your keynote speech at the Fordham Women’s Summit?
I think just taking responsibility. When we think of philanthropy, we tend to think of what we want to affect, but [it’s also about] taking responsibility and owning your power when it comes to outcomes.

We have, I think, the biggest mass exodus from the U.S. workforce in history. It started before the pandemic, but since the pandemic, a lot of people are just walking away from their jobs. They’re calling it the Great Resignation, but it’s also the Great Realization. When people were really forced to be in their lives, they saw how they spend their time, their priority, and how they were living was not adding up. So we’re saying a collective “no,” and the change that that’s causing in the workforce is amazing.

So, when people think about giving [and how they can use their financial power for good], I want them to think more about how can they be more demanding in terms of what they want to see happen.

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Kelly Prinz, FCRH ’15.

Watch the Fifth Annual Fordham Women’s Summit. Tisdale’s keynote address begins at 16:30.